At CES 2025, Corsair showed off the Frame 4000D as its new hotness among PC cases. There, the spin on this chassis was around its future potential, with Corsair showing off an array of alternative motherboard trays, prototype swap-in panels for the front face, and more. Corsair is bringing this case to market as-is for now, and the $109.99 version we tested stands well on its own, in terms of value, without any accessories. The Frame 4000D delivers a fair bit of flexibility in fan mounting, and room for multiple radiators and creature comforts galore that pleased us, given its around-$100 price point. It's an able competitor to cases like the Editors' Choice-winning NZXT H7 Flow, and slightly more substantial build quality might have brought it over the top to seize the crown. But we're still pretty happy with what a little more or less than $100 gets you here.
Design: A Floating Fancy
Corsair offers a bunch of possible versions of the Frame 4000D. The case itself comes in black or white, and you can get it without fans (Frame 4000D, $94.99), with three 120mm fans (Frame 4000D RS, $99.99), or with three RGB fans (Frame 4000D RS ARGB, $109.99).
Though the RS ARGB version tested here adds lights and fans, all versions feature the same "floating front panel" aesthetic. The front feet appear to be part of, as the name implies, a steel tube frame. It's just a look, though; once we realized that the “frame” was just a molded-in portion of a one-piece plastic face, the twisted metal mesh of its semi-floating metal front grille became the real focal point. That mesh and its repeating-"Y" pattern is a unique set-apart feature of the Frame's design.
After that, we began noticing smaller details like the extra Corsair logo on its tempered-glass upper side panel, and the white backing behind the perforations of its lower side panel. It's a pretty spiffy design for a relatively low-cost case.
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It appears almost unnatural for a company to put its front-panel connectors at the bottom of a mid-tower, but Corsair was banking on some of us still putting our towers on our desks when it made that design decision. The power button features LED backlighting for power-on indication; the audio jack next to it features an extra pole to work with single-plug headsets (the extra connection goes unused when plugging in standard headphones); the two Type-A USB ports are rated USB 3.x Gen 1; and the single Type-C port features a two-channel (Gen 2x2) interface.
Removing the above-mentioned grille via snap connectors at all four corners exposes the Frame 4000D’s front dust filter. Tabs at the top and magnets at the bottom secure the dust filter’s rigid frame to the case’s face panel.
The three 120mm fans are mounted to two movable rails, which Corsair dubs its InfiniRail system. These rails can be adjusted to fit two 140mm or 200mm fans, but getting to the screws that lock the rail adjustments is a bit of a chore. These are behind the face panel, which is screwed to the underside of the bottom panel, and sliding it down to remove it also means you're removing the front feet. (It's all of a piece, as you can see below.) Even after the face is detached from the metal chassis, it’s still held closely in place by the cables of its power button, audio jack, and USB ports. So this rail width-shift is something you'll only ever want to do once, if at all.
The back panel has a dual-pattern 140mm/120mm fan mount with adjustment slots that allow you to raise or lower that single fan’s position to better match your PC's other cooling hardware, or to make room for the end caps of radiators. The seven-slot PCI Express card bracket can be removed and rotated to fit the hardware for vertical graphics card mounting. And, while the power supply's bay has two sets of holes (to allow an ATX power supply to be mounted fan up or fan down), two of those holes feature captive screws that speed installation of your PSU in the most common orientation.
The sheet-metal right side-panel is also seen here, complete with its perforated section that’s designed to vent any side-mounted fans.
Outward-facing screw tabs always complicate the installation of expansion cards like GPUs, but at least the 20mm of space that the Frame 4000D provides (through which to insert the card’s own screw tab) is wide enough to avoid the issue we previously experienced with the InWin Dubili. In that review, we determined 19mm to be the minimum acceptable gap width to cover all of our hardware.
Also, note that the dust filter covering the power supply's air inlet slides out from the side, for easier reach compared to rear-access filters.
Pulling off the side panels revealed that a plastic air diverter was providing the white material that we saw through the lower left panel’s perforations. The right panel’s perforations, in contrast, are covered in a dust filtering sheet. The sheet sticks to the case via adhesive-backed magnetic tape, to which Corsair added a piece of black paper tape to prevent shifting during shipping. You'll want to remove that.
Covered with cutouts to support “reverse connector” (Asus BTF and MSI Project Zero) motherboard designs, the Frame 4000D's motherboard tray extends 11.4 inches behind the edge of the vertical cable shroud seen just behind the front fans. Additional holes above the board make more room to run cables over the top of the motherboard, and a big hole behind the CPU socket gives you hardware access to the underside of the motherboard after removing an SSD tray from the other side.
Extended ATX (EATX) motherboards can vary in size, and those that are less than 11 inches deep will fit here. But those that are more than 11.4 inches deep won’t, hence we didn’t apply the EATX label to our spec summary for this case. (Full EATX compliance requires 13 inches of clearance.)
A giant 165mm-deep gap in the power supply tunnel leaves around 140mm of space behind the stock fans to add a super-thick radiator and more fans. Other things, such as pump/reservoir combos, could also fit into some of that space, and the screw with the yellow plastic washer seen within that space can even be moved forward in 25mm increments if needed. That screw holds the case’s second drive tray, and sliding it forward increases power supply space while reducing space for a radiator up front.
Speaking of screws, there’s one sticking out of a long post behind the fan: That entire part is a card brace, and its extra-long screw tightens it to the cable shroud. Loosening the screw allows you to slide it up and down within its mounting slot to find the right spot to support the forward-facing ends of extra-long graphics cards at various heights.
The top of the Frame 4000D is factory-spaced to hold a pair of 140mm fans at various distances between the front and rear panels, but the InfiniRail adjustable mounting rails up here can be repositioned to hold up to three 120mm fans. There’s also enough space here to hold a 360mm-format radiator, if desired, but the narrow 32mm of distance between the fan mounts and the motherboard top ensures that nearly any radiator-and-fan combo will hang down, past the top of the motherboard. Fortunately, users of cooling systems (whether 120mm, 240mm, or 360mm) will find nearly 60mm of horizontal space between the right edge of their radiator/fan set and the motherboard’s face, which is enough room even for Corsair’s 56mm-tall Dominator Platinum RGB DIMMs. (It’s almost like the Frame 4000D’s designers planned for that! Hmmmm.)
The eight holes around the periphery of the power supply cover are threaded to hold two 120mm fans, and the four holes closer to the center are threaded to secure a vertical graphics-card adapter. None of those parts is included with any version of the Frame 4000D, not even the range-topping RS ARGB version that we’re testing. You'll have to bring your own vertical-mount kit and riser cable. The below photo also gives us a better look at the drive tray that’s mounted to inside of the case’s bottom panel.
Opening the right side, we find a little more space through which we can insert our power supply into its bay, several hook-and-loop cable ties, and the removable drive tray that we’d previously noted covers the back of the motherboard’s CPU socket (when installed). We also get a better look at how the cable shroud is affixed from back here. With its single screw at the top and its tabs at the bottom, the piece can be replaced with a factory-included side-fan bracket.
A side-by-side of the drive tray that sits before the power supply and the one that sits behind the motherboard tray shows that these are identical and, therefore, interchangeable. Each has enough holes at the proper locations to fit either two 2.5-inch drives or a single 3.5-inch drive, allowing builders to choose between mounting two 3.5-inch drives, one 3.5-inch and two 2.5-inch drives, or four 2.5-inch drives.
Building With the Corsair Frame 4000D RS ARGB
The Frame 4000D installation kit includes a side radiator mount to replace the factory-installed cable shroud, a blackout insert to replace the white one that’s factory-installed to the lower-left side panel, a magnetic strip to hide the visible portion of one of the reverse-connector cutouts, a button/LED breakout cable for the case’s native 9-pin front-panel connector, and a relocator bracket for the graphics card support. You also get a bundle of cable ties, seven bags of threaded hardware (including a spare motherboard standoff and two standoffs for a vertical graphics card bracket), and a warranty guide.
Here’s a closeup of the breakout adapter, which shouldn’t be needed for motherboards that have been introduced within the past five years. Major retail motherboard manufacturers quietly adopted the Y2K-era Intel standard by the end of 2019.
That 9-pin “F_PANEL” cable is among those that will join the case to our build’s motherboard, along with a Type-C (Gen 2x2) cable that connects the Type-C port, ARGB and PWM fan cables that connect the front fans, a 19-pin USB 3.x Gen 1 cable that connects the two USB Type-A ports, and an HD Audio cable for the headset combo jack.
It wasn’t until after we’d installed our motherboard that we figured out where that alternative GPU-support bracket was supposed to go. Here’s what it looks like with the support pin still sitting on its factory location and with our 12-inch-long graphics card installed.
You might have noticed above that our top-mounted radiator and fan hung quite a distance down past the top edge of our motherboard. We’ll remind those who skipped that section that the case is designed with nearly 60mm of clearance between the closest side of our 240mm radiator and the motherboard’s surface. All ended up fine in terms of clearance.
Here’s how the finished system appears when lit, with the fans in Rainbow mode. Slick!
Testing the Corsair Frame 4000D RS ARGB
Here’s a quick recap of the current ATX case-testing configuration that we used for our test build...
Thanks in part to its factory-mounted Corsair RS120 ARGB fans, the Frame 4000D RS ARGB takes second place in a six-way race in cooling both the CPU and the voltage regulator of our test platform. It fell to fourth place in GPU ventilation, but by just a few degrees.
A look at the noise levels shows us why the competing Asus case took first place in cooling so often: It uses powerful fans that also make a bunch of noise!
Still, the fans in any of these cases can be automatically controlled by our motherboard, so the full-speed test is the fairest one we could come up with. You can dial them back to the balance you prefer of noise versus cooling effectiveness.
Verdict: A Healthy Blend for PC Builders at a Low Price
The solid-performing Frame 4000D RS ARGB is beautifully built, with a generous feature set and a nice price, so what’s not to love?
We could quibble over the difficulty of accessing the front set of rails in the InfiniRail adjustment system, but most builders will probably leave the rails alone, since 360mm radiators can be installed without such adjustment. We could also mention that while the case technically has room for three 360mm-format radiators, the space remaining on one of those mounts probably wouldn’t be thick enough to install fans. But three radiators is extreme by any measure, and especially so in an around-$100 PC case So…perhaps skip the side-mounted radiator and only put fans in that location. Or just leave the cable shroud there.
Those limitations are practical ones for a case of this size and price. We'd like to see a few design tweaks: The outward-facing card screw bracket is more difficult to use than inset expansion slots; the skinny legs could use more rigidity, in keeping with the frame they’re designed to resemble; and the panel steel, while high-quality in fit and finish, could be a bit thicker. That thinness, though, explains how Corsair fit all of these fancy features into an 18.2-pound package.
Practical buyers who handle their cases a lot might pick a sturdier solution with fewer features for even less money; see our roundup of best overall PC cases. But for an attractive, one-and-done build, the Corsair 4000D RS ARGB delivers a great many features for a scant few dollars.
With a spiffy, unique front face, Corsair's Frame 4000D RS ARGB PC case offers a generous feature mix, fan-mount flexibility, and a nice finish for its low price.
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About Thomas Soderstrom
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